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It doesn't work like that. When you do actual science at the bench you find out fairly quickly whose work is solid and whose is like weak reeds. The trouble is
by HarryHirsch 5y ago
It doesn't work like that. When you do actual science at the bench you find out fairly quickly whose work is solid and whose is like weak reeds. The trouble is the misaligned incentives, everyone has good reason to keep silent for fear of attracting the attention of the funding agency. If something is afoot (the rumours are usually true), soon you are looking at 7-figure damages.
- CoastalCoder 5y agoI don't understand why that invalidates my idea though. In this case, Gates would be the funding agency. And its published findings would hopefully steer much academic teaching and research away from bad assumptions.
- HarryHirsch 5y agoThe problem isn't discovering who is a shady type, everyone knows who they are already. But they just won't get outed or dealt with. The Hellinga scandal at Duke is very typical. This is what is looks like from outside: https://www.buffalo.edu/content/dam/www/news/imported/pdf/May08/NatureChemistryPaperWithdrawn.pdf https://www.buffalo.edu/content/dam/www/news/imported/pdf/Ma... And this is an inside account: https://caffeinatedchemist.medium.com/hellinga-66449cf4699e https://caffeinatedchemist.medium.com/hellinga-66449cf4699e It's exclusively an accountability issue.
- joe_the_user 5y agoJust to elaborate on the "it doesn't work that way" part. Science is hard. Replicating an experiment is costly in time and money. The papers in scientific field are organized like a tree. A good paper by a good and credible researcher will be a base node that other papers branch off of. A poor or not credible paper will be leaf that won't be cited by others. Testing all the poor papers would be tremendous waste of time. And it wouldn't catch fraudsters as such because not being replicable isn't proof of fraud.